A Motherhood and Palestine Round Up

The best writing about motherhood and Palestine I've found here recently

Salaam my friends!

Happy Sunday to all and happy mother’s day to those who celebrate. This week I’m coming to you off schedule on two occasions: today, with a round up of some writing on mothers I just had to share because it floored me, and again on Wednesday with a collab I’m very excited about.

We don’t do much in my house for mother’s day, mainly because I feel like we’re already over-scheduled, and all I ever really want on holidays are pancakes and an opportunity to sleep in. Thankfully, my kids are now old enough to allow for both, so when this lands in your inbox, I will (hopefully) still have an hour or two of snoring daintily (ha!) in my bed, followed by a carb-loaded meal and some good, strong coffee.

I read a lot of gorgeous writing on motherhood this week, but my heart was in the poetry. Some of it was so good I couldn’t imagine keeping it to myself, so I’m linking it here for you to read.

Ambata Kazi

, my wonderful online friend, wrote this breathtaking poem for mothers enduring war and genocide. It’s a quiet poem, about peace with a lowercase p, that left me crying with the beauty of the mundane, with the injustice of everything that has been taken away from the mothers that endure this world right now. We spend so much time on the capital P, on the numbers of dead and injured, on what we’ll find in future textbooks. But what we’re losing right now is the day-to-day living. The good of it, the bad of it, the slog of it, the unremarkable. And this is what Ambata captures so well below.

Rachel Leeke

, another online friend, wrote this poem for mothers, honouring all their work and love. Reading it made me want to call my mom and also be a better mom. Try as I might, I cannot get this post to properly embed, so you’ll have to click on the link, but I adored these lines:

”she told every instructor and the janitor too "don't be afraid to call" right in front of you in full committment to the mild threat “

I love how Rachel’s poem captures both the sternness and the love a mother shows.

And finally I’ve taken this poem I wrote in December out from behind the paywall for a couple of weeks in honour of my mother, who prays more beautifully than anyone else I know.

This week has been incredibly difficult for Gaza and the West Bank. Rafah, the last inhabitable zone in Gaza — in that it was less destroyed than every other part of the strip that Israel has bombed — and where at least 1.3 million displaced Palestinians were sheltering, is now under a full-scale attack by the Israeli military.

The images, the videos, the stories coming out of Rafah are apocalyptic in horror. Over a million people, 600,000 of whom are children, are crowded into tents because their homes have already been destroyed. And then those tents are bombed.

breakingthesilenceisrael

A post shared by @breakingthesilenceisrael

I am struggling to repeat the words, to share the links, week after week, because the idea that things would change if only people knew is clearly not true.

At this point, people know.

Some of them are horrified and still demanding change. Others are horrified and exhausted, but they’re also confused and overwhelmed. The apathy and the hopelessness have kicked in.

Which is, I think, intended — wear people down so that even if they want change, they feel like it’s impossible and give up. Tell people it’s complicated, that they don’t understand the history. Make them doubt that feeling in their gut that says there can’t possibly be a justification for killing this many civilians, for the destruction of an entire society.

Yet a third group is not horrified. A third group believes this is normal, this is necessary, this is just the way the world works. Or worse, this is deserved. This is a reasonable punishment for the people of Gaza.

I’ve written before about the reasons I’m still pushing for an end to the killing. I remind myself every day to plant the sapling. In that vein, I wanted to share the best writing I found on Substack to do with Palestine this week.

If you’re confused, if you’re sick to your stomach but you also feel like you aren’t “informed enough to speak out”, these pieces are for you.

Frederick Joseph

wrote this incredible essay on the way distraction is leveraged to trivialize the massacres.

Hamilton Nolan

masterfully breaks down the response to the student protests

Jenna Park

talks about protests from the perspective of a conflicted mother.

Please keep speaking out. Please join a peaceful demonstration, call your reps, write letters, apply pressure any way you can. It is literally a matter of life and death.

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Let’s chat in the comments:

1. How are you feeling about mother's day? Do you have plans or are you oversaturated when it comes to scheduled holidays?

2. Is there any other writing or media about Gaza that has really stood out to you that you wish more people would read or see?

3. Do you ever find yourself reading or watching legacy media and thinking “what are they talking about??” Tell me about it!